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Excelsior Class
The history of the Excelsior Class tends to consist of extremes. The Excelsior Class was the testbed for many new techologies and ideas in Starfleet thinking including a captains ready room, failed transwarp drive, and a new style of living arrangements for Starfleet officers. Initially fitted with a transwarp drive and proclaimed 'The Great Experiment', the ship had an ignoble start when its engines failed when it was called into action to prevent the theft of the USS Enterprise. Although this was due to deliberate sabotage, it transpired that the Excelsior had been saved from a major disaster. Engineers working to correct the damage discovered a series of flaws in the transwarp drive which, had it been used, would have caused a nacelle implosion which would have destroyed the ship. The USS Excelsior spent nearly a full year in spacedock while engineering specialists struggled to repair the problem. Re-launched early in 2286, the ship met with little more success. Although the fatal flaw of the transwarp drive was repaired, the system was subject to major problems and over the next year it never completed a successful test, much to the embarrassment of Captain Styles and his crew. Finally, Starfleet cancelled the transwarp project altogether, and for a short time the Excelsior faced decommissioning. There was nothing wrong with the basic engineering of the space frame however, and in all other areas the Excelsior Class was still the most advanced ship in Starfleet, and indeed the entire quadrant, by a considerable margin. In light of this Starfleet rapidly decided to fit the Excelsior Class with a more conventional propulsion system. She returned to spacedock for the third time in 2287 to have her hull converted to run with a standard warp drive. This process went remarkably smoothly, and by the end of the year the Excelsior was in space again. From here the history of the ship leapt from one extreme to the other. From being a costly and embarrassing failure, the Excelsior rapidly built a reputation for outstanding performance and a solid reliability few other designs have matched. Series production commenced at once, and continued unbroken for the next thirty nine years, a record for Federation shipbuilding. The Excelsior herself was assigned to Captain Hikaru Sulu in 2290 and conducted extensive scientific, exploratory and diplomatic missions under his distinguished command. Since then the Excelsior has been a mainstay of the Federation fleet for nearly one hundred years, although production was eventually cut and the last Excelsior rolled out of dry dock in 2351. After refitting the class for decades to conform with updates and upgrades in technology, the class has massively outlived it's original twenty year life expectancy. The Excelsior Class also played a pivotal role in the fight against both the Borg Collective and Dominion. Many have now been retired, given other, non-Starfleet issued duties or scrapped for other, newer classes of ship. However just as many still remain in service and are expected to continue until finally breaking down, or are replaced. Overall, the class is supposed to have been replaced by the Explorer Class, but the phasing out of the Excelsior class is not expected until 2405 at the earliest, more than 120 years after the first was built. Enterprise Sub-Type Like any ship class, changes were made to the Excelsior throughout her build program. While most of these were relatively minor and left little outward appearance of change evident, in 2293 a very significant change was authorized for the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B which was then in the later stages of construction. These included an extra set of impulse engines on the saucer section, flares on the side of the engineering hull, and a minor change in configuration for the warp nacelles. These changes were a result of the recently decommissioned USS Enteprise-A confrontation with the Bird-of-Prey commanded by the conspirator General Chang. The advent of Klingon vessels who could fire while under cloak was understandably alarming to Starfleet planners, as well as the possibility of this technology falling into the hands of the Romulans via Ambassador Nanclus. Faced with the possibility of enemy craft that could evade the sensors of Starfleet's best ships, designers at the Advanced Starship Design Bureau hastily made changes to the Excelsior design to help combat this newly perceived threat. The advanced sensor systems that had assisted the Excelsior and Enterprise in their battle against Chang were not part of the standard sensor package on Starfleet ships at that point, and so they were added in to the main sensor array. This would, however, necessitate the forward shift of many other systems of the class' sensor systems and navigational deflector which resulted in the hull flares that flanked the deflector. Additional impulse engines were also added outboard of the standard main engine systems in the hopes of improving the maneuvering systems of the class in the face of the threat of engagements with larger numbers of smaller, highly maneuverable Klingon attack craft. Following the successful completion of the Enterprise-B, forty-five of the following ships of the class were completed to the altered design. While a technical success, the alternate configuration was simply one that was created to face a threat that never materialized. Chang's Bird of Prey ended up being the only ship to be equipped with the experimental cloaking system. It turned out that the system had been developed by several isolated engineers with Chang taking the secrets of the completed system to his grave. The Romulan government also never deployed the system, either because they lacked access or because of its inherent weaknesses. By the time the Treaty of Algeron was signed in 2311 the changing political climate minimized threats from both the Romulans and Klingons. The former had retreated beyond the Nuetral Zone into a period of isolationism while relations with the latter had been improving ever since the Khitomer conference and the likelihood of a direct conflict seemed remote. This new reality would combine with technical changes to spell the end of the variant build program. By 2310, the advanced sensors that the vessels had been outfit with had become part of the standard sensor package on all Starfleet ships. The promised increased maneuverability of the additional impulse engines had never truly lived up to Starfleet's expectations, and it was becoming increasingly felt that the hull space that was given up for additional impulse reactors and engine systems could be put to better use in order to house advanced scientific equipment and facilities. By 2315, all following Excelsiors were once again built to the original configuration. The altered design have been variously refered to as the “Enteprise-class”, the “long-hull group”, or the “Excelsior refit”. However, Starfleet never held any institutional difference between the long-hull and standard Excelsior configurations, and refits and upgrades have been applied to both groups equally in the intervening years leaving little difference, aside from the obvious cosmetic ones, between the two. Category:Federation Classes